Google "Afriqiyah Air," the Libyan airline I flew to get to Ghana, and the first result you get is the webpage of the airline (it's only a tiny bit surprising that the link is dead, and has been for months). The second result is the "routes and rumours" page of AirlinerNews.com, a site that "aims to bring hot off the press information to the aviation enthusiast and industry professionals" (which makes it sound as if there is only one person on the planet who is enthused about aviation). The third link is to this blog, which I found pretty curious.
Anyway, it got me to wondering how exactly people are visiting this blog, and why. So I went to Typepad (which "powers" this site) and checked out the "statistics and referrers" page, where you can see how many people visited your site per week, hour, and day. You can't actually learn much about these visitors, except that in my case a little over half are coming from Google searches - Google.com, Google.au, Google.uk, Google.dk, and a surprising number from Google.se, which is Sweden. All /search. Interesting. For example, someone at 2:55pm today landed on the "I see old people" post, coming from google.com/search. So I clicked on that referring link, and it showed me a Google search results page - the very page that the searcher had generated. In the search box on that page are the searcher's actual search terms. The person who landed on the "I see old people" post had searched for "old man cane photo." A weird search, but interesting. And strange that I should be able to see that information.
Here are some other terms that people searched on today that led them to this blog:
- skater fights a security guard movie
- rasta love women accra
- green turtle dixcove ghana
- Lagoon Lodge in Winneba
- What are the steps to drawing a lobster
- Ghana traditional Drum School 2005
- lobster typing game
Hmm. Strange what you can glean about a person and their intentions from their search terms. Capitalization = discomfort with the web, perhaps. Three people are traveling or want to. Someone either wants to be an artist or is a nervous cook and forgot to include the words "butter for" in their search. Someone else wants some action (I suspect that searcher is Ghanaian, sitting in an internet cafe in Accra). Someone wants to see that movie he liked but only remembers vaguely. That last one is a puzzle, though. Lobster typing game? The mind whirls.
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